Berlin’s Pop-Kultur Festival celebrates its 10th year in kaleidoscopic style

A lot has changed about Berlin since 2015, but the sprawling complex of red-and-yellow brick buildings – built in the late 1800s – remains a vital part of the city’s cultural baseline. The dozen buildings here are home to bars, restaurants, cinemas, academic institutions, theatres, music and dance schools, publishers, a museum and, most importantly for the purpose of this review, a generous number of music venues ranging from the cavernous Kesselhaus to the tiny Panda Platform.

Since moving here in 2017, Pop-Kultur has grown to take up roughly half of the space, offering more than 100 events taking place across 10 indoor venues and a couple of pop-up stages in the courtyards. Many of the events and all exhibitions are free, requiring no wristband, so anyone is welcome – provided they leave any bigotry or boundary-crossing behaviour at home, that is. Pop-Kultur prides itself on having an open culture of discourse, and goes the extra mile with its code of conduct and provisions for maximum accessibility. All of which means that when 10,000 people a day visit the site – whether popping by after work for some drag queen karaoke or fully committing to the programme – every one of them can do so feeling safe.

The festival curation operates on the same principles of openness and care, and of equal treatment for all. There are no real ‘headliners’ and no hierarchy here, which immediately distinguishes Pop-Kultur from 99% of other festivals. It was also one of the first events to mandate at least a 50% quota of acts identifying as women or non-binary – again, something that most other festivals could learn from. It’s a truly global event, too, providing a platform for artists from a vast array of different cultural backgrounds, even ostensibly conflicting ones.

Pop-Kultur takes all these things very seriously, but, ultimately, it’s all in service of simply having a great time and broadening horizons. As Germany’s current culture minister Claudia Roth says in her opening speech at this year’s event, “Anyone who wants pop wants diversity [and] a democratic society” – a touch of wishful thinking, perhaps, but it’s not a bad place to start.

Pop-Kultur has always been an important platform for artists from the African continent – co-curator Pamela Owusu-Brenyah also runs her own music platform AFRO x POP – but it’s especially true for this tenth edition, with appearances from Lagos-based superstar and “Rebel Queen” Yemi Alade, Ghanaian rapper Black Sherif, Nigerian alté musician Lady Donli, experimental Kenyan artist Blinky Bill, and charismatic ball of energy Kabeaushé, also from Nairobi but – as of three months ago – now living in Berlin.

There’s a purposeful focus, too, on post-migrant and queer artists, spearheaded by the festival’s Yeşim Duman, who is the brains behind the open-air stage Çaystube (a Turkish–German word meaning ‘tearoom’), one of Pop-Kultur’s most accessible and experimental spaces. All routes through the Kulturbrauerei courtyard pass by the Çaystube – now in its fifth year as an integrated part of the festival – and its lively and unpredictable programming often draws large crowds. German rap trio bangerfabrique and Austrian–Turkish hip-hop duo EsRAP are particularly impressive, while the sheer chaos of Olympia Bukkakis’s Unlimited T is glorious to see.

Situated on the upper floor at the back of the Kesselhaus building, Maschinenhaus functions as the venue for many of Pop-Kultur’s specially commissioned works, including Ulrich ‘Ulla’ Hartmann’s hugely entertaining performance art take on toxic masculinity and Sheffield-born, Berlin-based Otis Mensah’s transportative “Tenderness and Cruelty”, a multidisciplinary tour de force that leaves me wondering how on earth I’ve never heard of him before. It also hosts a surprise appearance by Peaches, who joins queer Palestinian artist Bashar Murad on stage for an ecstatically flamboyant display of self-actualisation, and a wonderfully idiosyncratic performance from Irish oddball Rachael Lavelle, who throws in perhaps the world’s most unexpected cover of ABBA’s “Lay All Your Love on Me” – a song that now lives in my head rent-free.

Meanwhile, in the split-level Kesselhaus space, with its towering concrete walls, the Berlin late summer heat is particularly intense. Kabeaushé quickly discards their jacket and peels off the top half of their velvet bodysuit – “This is not part of the act,” they joke, and the blonde wig stays firmly on – while Scottish band Arab Strap seem to be visibly wilting until a large fan appears at the side of the stage. Later I spot them in the queue for free ice cream, a welcome addition to day two of the festival when the temperature soars to nearly 35°C.

As “Mama Africa”, Yemi Alade fares much better in the extreme heat, not slowing down for more than a second during a spectacularly high-voltage set that gets the whole of Kesselhaus dancing. Gaye Su Akyol draws a large and vibey crowd, too, bewitching the room with her space-age Anatolian psych-rock. The Istanbul-based artist is a regular visitor to Berlin, and gets a huge cheer from the crowd when she reveals that she’ll soon be relocating there ahead of her debut musical theatre production Consistent Fantasy is Reality, opening at Komische Oper Berlin in February 2025. “I’m going to take you on a beautiful trip,” she promises, the bells around her waist jingling softly as she reaches for the stars.

Over in the beautiful Palais space, Turkish-German artist Ilgen-Nur – appearing at Pop-Kultur for a third time – is another happy discovery, with her Laurel Canyon-inspired indie-pop songs setting an appropriately blissful mood ahead of a new commissioned work by Berlin-based quartet Hope and British video artist Emma Critchley – an atmospheric sub-oceanic adventure that shares a title with the band’s most recent album Navel. Another commissioned work by Cameroon-born artist Steve Mekoduja impresses with its multidisciplinary meditations on love and freedom, complete with a string ensemble and choir. For those looking for something a little tougher around the edges, Pop-Kultur veterans The KVB sound convincingly titanic with songs from their most recent album Tremors going just as hard as older classics like “Captives” and “Shadows”.

Over in the pitch-black space of the resurrected Berlin institution Frannz Club, Pop-Kultur plays host to some of the festival’s most uncompromising acts. Queer Bulgarian artist/activist Ivo Dimchev is magnetically brilliant, part bird-like diva, part old-school crooner. Munich-based art-school band What Are People For offer a more cynical variety of playful subversion, while sex-positive party starter Zebra Katz brings formidable intelligence and skill to the festival’s most deliriously sensual performance. It's quite a whiplash moment, going from Keeley Forsyth’s forbiddingly tenebrous set to Katz’s minimal erotic rap circus in the space of 20 minutes, but that’s the beauty of Frannz and Pop-Kultur as a whole: off-centre, unpredictable and, at its very best, a meaningful exchange.

Another standout moment is found in Lucidvox’s charged performance at Panda Platform, with additional vocals from Kazakh musician and actor Ella Baiysbayeva, who is here at Pop-Kultur as part of its Goethe Talents residency. Last time Lucidvox were at the festival, seven years ago, they were almost unknown outside of Russia; now, with two phenomenal albums out on Hamburg-based label Glitterbeat, their star is rising internationally. They deserved a bigger stage here though, I feel.

No festival can get everything right, of course, but no one can argue that Pop-Kultur hasn’t put in the work. Their dedication to platforming artists from the global underground, and their hands-on approach to awareness and inclusivity already puts them in a league almost all their own. I’ve no doubt that it will still be around in another 10 years, still pushing boundaries and redrawing the musical map.